


if half the world's gone mad (the other half just don't care)

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: the odds were never in our favor [9]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Character Study, Diego won the 63rd Games, Drabble, Introspection, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Survivor Guilt, Worldbuilding, You thought wrong, reginald hargreeves is president snow, the hargreeves siblings were victors, you thought diego would escape this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 03:57:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18490855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: No one ever remembers anything about Diego's Games save the way his blade flashed, the way he carved across children's throats like a butcher in a slaughterhouse. No one ever remembers the Arena itself, the abandoned city full of booby traps. No one remembers the names of the children who died so that he could win.All there is to a Victor's legacy is their kill count, the way they killed, the betrayals they made and the way they survived.People forget the Arenas the Victors were shaped in, the Arenas that built the Victor's legacies.Diego is the only Victor he knows to visit the past Arenas, which have been preserved as vacation spots for Capitolites to visit. He does it in the weeks after each year's Victory Tour, carving anywhere from two to five more Arenas off of his list. The moment the newest Victor (Hazel, Luther, Finnick, Allison, Grayson, Klaus, Annie, Five, Vanya, Katniss) finishes their stop in District Ten, Diego is on a train to another Arena.(Diego visits old Arenas and finds nothing but reminders of grief there. And yet, he keeps going back.)





	if half the world's gone mad (the other half just don't care)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "World Gone Mad" by Bastille.
> 
> Guess what, suckers? I was reading some Hunger Games fic again and I realized that I hadn't given Diego a focus fic like everyone else had gotten. Inspiration struck, and this popped out. Hope you don't mind.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, quick reminder of the Hargreeves in this 'verse as I know it's been a little while:  
> District 1: Allison, won the 67th Games by forming alliances and backstabbing everyone (one time literally)  
> District 2: Luther, won the 65th Games by brute strength and utilizing the metal spikes that rained from the sky at night  
> District 3: Five, won the 71st Games by using the mines around the Cornucopia to take out the enitre Career pack ont he second day (youngest Victor in memory, won at age 12)  
> District 5: Vanya, won the 73rd Games by manipulating the power source on the tundra-like Arena to divert all warmth to her  
> District 8: Ben, oldest Victor among 7, won the 58th Games by feeding his female partner poison berries and strangling a girl to death while feverish and delirious (later was Klaus' mentor)  
> District 8: Klaus, won the 69th Games by hiding and sneaking around in the cave-Arena at night, waited for mutts to take out all competitors (made living in Capitol by selling his body after the Games)  
> District 10: Diego, won the 63rd Games by the use of his knife and knowledge of weak spots on a body

_Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder._

**― Robert G. Ingersoll**

 

No one ever remembers anything about Diego's Games save the way his blade flashed, the way he carved across children's throats like a butcher in a slaughterhouse. No one ever remembers the Arena itself, the abandoned city full of booby traps. No one remembers the names of the children who died so that he could win.

All there is to a Victor's legacy is their kill count, the way they killed, the betrayals they made and the way they survived.

People forget the Arenas the Victors were shaped in, the Arenas that built the Victor's legacies.

Diego is the only Victor he knows to visit the past Arenas, which have been preserved as vacation spots for Capitolites to visit. He does it in the weeks after each year's Victory Tour, carving anywhere from two to five more Arenas off of his list. The moment the newest Victor (Hazel, Luther, Finnick, Allison, Grayson, Klaus, Annie, Five, Vanya, Katniss) finishes their stop in District Ten, Diego is on a train to another Arena.

He meets Capitolites at the most popular ones, basking in awe at these monuments to the glory of the Capitol. They will sometimes fawn over him, asking him about his own Games, but more often than not they ignore him and his scarred, glowering face. As the years press on, they tend to forget him in favor of newer, flashier Victors.

Whatever their reaction to him, though, their reactions to the Arenas remain the same: gossipy awe, as if the Arenas were just monuments to their favorite fashions rather than the leftover ruins of Games that killed hundreds of children. Capitolites crowd the Arenas on vacations with their families, laughing and crowding and  _not understanding_ what happened here.

(At the less popular Arenas- the 70th, the 69th, the 27th, the 64th, the 8th- the ones with less popular endings, the ones that ended in accidents or without bloodbaths or just straight up  _starved_ their tributes to death- he finds very few Capitol citizens. Sometimes, like at the 12th Arena (where the tributes straight up refused to kill each other until the Gamemakers started turning them insane with the screams of the relatives they were torturing back home), he finds no one.)

Luther has his cats to memorialize the dead, and together they have their alcohol-soaked toasts. But Diego alone- well, he goes. He visits. He is the only person taking the tours who knows what it's like to be starving and covered in blood ( _not yours, never yours, because you have a knife and they have nothing_ ) and listening desperately for the sounds of cannons to tell him that the Careers have taken each other out.

(Those sounds haunt his dreams. The booms of the cannons and the scratching of rats in the abandoned city of his Arena tear his mind apart, leave him waking up in his bed with sweat soaking the sheets and his screams muffled by soundproof walls.) 

-

Diego wins the sixty-third Hunger Games, before Luther or Allison or Klaus or Vanya or Five or Katniss are even blips on the Capitol's radar. He's a quiet Victor, an unassuming man who makes no impact in the Capitol save with his knives, their flash captivating the Capitol for months after his Games.

At the party at the President's Mansion at the end of his Victory Tour, Diego finds dozens of Capitolites who have had silver strips dyed into their skin from their wrists to their elbows, who have had leather harnesses installed on their clothing like the kind that his stylist put him in during his Victor's Interview, who have had tiny "scars" tattooed next to their right eyes to mirror the one he got in the Arena. 

The night of the party sees Diego in the bathroom in his Victor's apartment, puking his guts out. He can't believe that they have turned the weapons he used to kill  _children_ into signs of status, the newest fads in Capitol fashion.

(The next day, Ben- the victor from Eight from a few years ago, the one whose mentor killed herself right after he became a Victor- finds him and takes him out to lunch. Ben is kind,  _too_ kind, but it helps. Ben understands the nightmares, the disgust with the Capitol. He understands what it's like to have to sit there and watch as the Capitol turns the worst memories of his life into something to gawk at and romanticize.) 

Diego's first year, after his Victory Tour is over, he visits the 55th Arena first. There he sees the Arena that brought about a win from Vlad of District 5- the Arena had been a labyrinth that had provided for the longest Games of all time at an entire month, with mutts being used to chase tributes around the maze-like Arena.

It's sobering, to be sure, seeing the first Arena other than his in person. The place is cleaned of all the blood he remembers seeing on the screens as a child, but everything about this place feels a bit...faded, almost. This isn't a popular Arena, though it's not the least popular by any means. It almost feels real, in the most artificial sort of way.

(He doesn't visit his own Arena. Not yet. He can't bear to see the cobblestone streets of the ruined city in which he slaughtered children. He can't bear to remember the blood staining the roads, the screams of the dying, the sky flickering with the faces of the dead.)

Diego visits other Arenas. He buys flowers from the gift shops. He doesn't name them- he's not Luther, he doesn't think he could bear that- but remembers the numbers. He remembers their Arenas. He remembers the places they died.

He visits the 43rd Arena, a dry wasteland where half of the tributes were killed violently by poisonous rat-like mutts and the Victor was a girl from Eleven who had been the daughter of an exterminator.

He visits the 24th, dark as the darkest slaughterhouse at night, an Arena made out of a giant bank vault where no food was dropped in and the tributes were forced to fight each other with night-vision goggles as they slowly starved. It was the first Arena with mutts, and that was how the Victor had survived- by killing the mutts and eating it to survive. 

He visits Ben's and Luther's and Allison's and Klaus' and Vanya's and Five's. He sees the cavern labyrinth Klaus outlasted, the metal spikes they never dug out of the ground after Luther's win, the shifting quagmire Allison escaped from, the tundra Vanya manipulated, the prairie permanently scarred by Five's bomb blasts.

(The only Victor's Arena he never gets to is Katniss'. Hers is set to be visited after the 75th Hunger Games, and, well, the moment Diego hears the announcement about the Quarter Quell he knows he won't survive to finish his own personal Tour.)

-

With every year he passes by and more children die and he visits more Arenas, he adds tallies to the tattoos on his stomach. He gets used to the feeling of failure, of knowing that Ten never has a chance and that the only reason he won was because half of the Careers took each other out once they hit the Final Eight.

As his tributes keep dying and the feeling of defeat seeps into every aspect of his being, he sometimes wonders why he was never conscripted into being a whore like Klaus or Finnick or Allison. He's a Victor, after all, and maybe not the best looking sort, but that has never really stopped Capitolites before. (If being as severely underaged as Finnick or Allison didn't stop them, he doubts ugliness would stop them either.)

It's only as he hits up the 69th Arena (in the Tour after the 70th- he usually gives a year before visiting an Arena, so that he has time to process his screens going black as those years' tributes died), that he realizes that his own Tour, his trips to the Arenas- President Hargreeves is using him as a symbol, if very much in a way that Diego didn't intend.

President Hargreeves sees the value in having one of his Victors willing to go visit the Arenas. He sees the value in having Diego as a symbol of a returning Victor, that at least one of his Victors is showing up to Arenas (Capitolite tourist traps, District graveyards) and giving the Capitolite vacationers a chance to see an "authentic" Victor at an "authentic" Arena.

But Diego doesn't care. He hates President Hargreeves with all he has, for everything that's happened. Every tally on Diego's skin is a death to Hargreeves' name. Every Arena, each batch of twenty three dead children, every black screen cut off during a Games- they are all his fault.

But visiting the Arenas- it was never about President Hargreeves. Diego keeps visiting those fucking Arenas, year in and year out, because someone has to. Someone has to treat the Arenas not like tourist traps, not like some frivolous vacation for the family, but like the graveyards they are. Someone has to hold a memorial at each Arena, give a funeral of sorts to the children who died too early.

Diego won't forget. He can't forget. He will do what he can to pay tribute to those tributes who died for no reason, whose sacrifice was not for any sort of worthy goal but because they were conscripted against their will into the games.

Diego can't do much, but he can do this.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, hope you guys liked this small prologue of sorts! If you did, I'd love to read any comments you might have! Your outpouring of support on "show me how my armor ends" was amazing and I must absolutely thank you all for it.


End file.
